Aboriginal women take centre stage at indigenous film festival

18.10.08

TORONTO — Aboriginal women are taking centre stage at one of the world's largest film festivals to feature work by indigenous artists, with grandmothers at the forefront of the week's biggest screenings.

The imagineNATIVE film festival kicks off Wednesday in Toronto with a documentary about a Winnipeg grandmother who struggles to accept her aboriginal heritage and an Australian film in which an aboriginal grandmother leaves behind her tribal culture to become an actress.

Artistic director Danis Goulet says more than 40 per cent of the festival's 105 films come from female filmmakers, a slightly higher ratio than previous years for the five-day movie marathon.

"All of these films...are really focusing on the perspectives of women and the stories of women, but I would say specifically the courage of women," says Goulet.

"The courage of women to step outside of what they know, to go up against insurmountable odds."

Opening the festival is "Memere Metisse," a 30-minute documentary by first-time filmmaker Janelle Wookey, co-host of the APTN show "Friday Night Flick." It's a lighthearted look at a painful subject for Wookey's grandmother - her aboriginal heritage.

Through a series of playful interviews, Wookey interrogates her grandmother about her past, with the beleaguered woman initially appearing as a reluctant participant in what started out as a student project. By the end of the film, Wookey's grandmother proudly declares her native roots and gets her own Metis card.

"She was a tough cookie to crack," says the 22-year-old Wookey, who will attend the festival with her grandmother, mother, brother, two aunts and a cousin.

"A lot of people of my memere's generation still call Metis half-breeds and my memere is a very proud person.... It's more (from) them that she was hiding it, I think."

Since she made the film, Wookey says other family members have sought out their Metis cards, too.

"I want people of my memere's generation to see this ...and open up and let go of those old stigmas about the Metis," says Wookey, who completed the film this spring as part of a course at Red River College.

"A lot of people my age don't even know they're Metis because their memere and pepere aren't telling them. Three, four people in my class discovered they were Metis after watching this film because their grandparents had kept it a secret."

Also opening the festival is the Australian 52-minute feature "River of No Return," about an indigenous woman's long-held desire to be a movie star like Marilyn Monroe.

Almost half of the films come from other countries, says Goulet, with Australia and New Zealand supplying the bulk of foreign material.

One of the highlights among the Canadian films is set to be a Saturday-night screening of "Before Tomorrow," a haunting tale about an Inuit woman and her grandson abandoned on a desolate island. The film was the first feature by the Inuit women's collective Arnait Video Workshop and won a $15,000 prize for best Canadian first feature film at last month's Toronto International Film Festival.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with the filmmakers.

"In the age where the auteur filmmaker is so celebrated, it's really interesting to look at the model of working within a collective," says Goulet.

"Two of the women in the collective and one of the co-directors are grandmothers' age and it's also a story where the grandmother plays the lead. This is just not a demographic that you see reflected on film very often."

The festival closes Sunday with the U.S. film, "Older than America," directed by as well as starring Canadian filmmaker Georgina Lightning and starring Winnipeg actor Adam Beach ("Law & Order: SVU"). The thriller focuses on a woman's haunting visions surrounding atrocities that took place at a Minnesota boarding school.

The festival runs until Oct. 19.

Labels: Aboriginal women